Alekhine Memorial Round 5

The players in the Alekhine Memorial bade farewell to Paris today with another thrilling round for chess fans to enjoy!

World champion Vishy Anand clawed his way back to an even score with his first win of the tournament against DIng Liren. The Caro-Kann is taking a bit of beating in major tournaments lately, and Anand's novelty 14. Qe2 provoked the blunder 24...g6 after which black's king was doomed.

But the shock of the round was bottom seed Laurent Fressinet demolishing Vladimir Kramnik with the black pieces in just 32 painful moves for the Russian. Ouch!

Maxime Vachier-Lagrave completed a great day for the French fans by beating cellar-dweller Peter Svidler, also with the black pieces. The games between Michael Adams and Nikita Vitiugov, and Boris Gelfand and Lev Aronian ended all-square, so Maxime Vachier-Lagrave has the sole lead on 3½/5. "Sometimes it's nice to be french :)" tweeted Maxime!

The tournament now moves to St.Petersburg for the remaining 4 rounds, starting on Sunday.

The Alekhine Memorial takes place from 21 April - 1 May. The official site can be found here, with live game analysis here and video commentary here (with archive).

The tournament is a 10-player single round robin competition, with the first half held in the Louvre in Paris and the second half in the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg.

The time control is 100 minutes for 40 moves, then 50 minutes for the next 20 moves, then 15 minutes to a finish with a 30 second increment from the start. No draw offers are allowed until after 40 moves have been played. The prize fund is €100,000 with €30,000 for first place.

All rounds start at 14:00 local time (12:00 UTC when in Paris, 10:00 UTC when in St. Petersburg), except the last round which is 1 hour earlier.

Comments

Everyone keeps forgetting that players of Anand and Kramnik's era had no computers. Having a chess engine of modern standards with opening books loaded is a HUGE advantage for the new generation of chess players. Things back then had to be done manually, including game analysis.

I have to say that I think Kramnik is in great form. He just recently poured his heart and soul into the Candidates, where he finished level with Magnus Carlsen (and lost only due to a controversial tie-break system). Now here at the Alekhine I wouldn't say that he has played poorly. It's clearly an impressive bit of preparation by Laurent Fressinet (and research by his second, Richard Rapport) that caught Vlad off guard in this opening. But I wouldn't worry about him too much. There are still four rounds to go!

What the hell did go into Kramnik? To me he always has been on of the most respected players ever, though (or just because of) his "a little boring" style of playing. But has anybody ever seen an opening strategy like this?

@ chess pune I have to disagree. In his earlier years he wa a demolishing player, a great tactical attacker, but he has lost his edge over the years. I'm suprised he's held on to the World Championship this long, being that he was matched with Gelfand previously, and he's not even in the top five. He's rated #6 according to Fide's rating list. No way is he more talented than Carlsen. He hadn't come near the sucsess Carlsen has obtained at his age. In fact, Anand was 24 before he made it to the Candidates and was 28 before he qualified to challenge the World Champion ( which was Karpov) losing the match.

I saw some of them are saying that Carokann demolished. As per me Carokann has to handle properly. Check our Karpov games he is the expert even our Anand use to play Carokann against Karpov. If any one mishandle any openings will be hammered. I can give a example Kasparov got hammered by DeepBlue when he play Carokann against Deep blue.

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